This is, in some respects, a crap country, writes Fintan O'Toole.
We are ludicrously bad at one of the basic elements of citizenship: respect for the law. The planning laws, as Mike Milotte's devastating report for Prime Time showed last week, are a sick joke. The State is incapable of prosecuting a judge on very serious criminal charges because the paperwork gets screwed up. We continue to slaughter each other on the roads because the Garda operates the penalty points system by writing things down in dusty ledgers that were old-fashioned when Bob Cratchit was using them.
Ministers, from Charlie McCreevy and Joe Walsh in their determination to shovel money into Punchestown, to Noel Dempsey using civil servants as party election workers, flout the most basic principles of good government.
We are, even by the most negligible definition, extremely bad at being citizens. By any broader definition of the notion of citizenship - looking after each other, especially when we're in trouble - we have decent instincts but seldom manage to translate them into decent politics.
Last week, for example, even while the Dáil was debating the citizenship referendum, the members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children were visibly shocked by a presentation from the Irish College of Psychiatrists on the mental health services, in which, in one of the world's richest states, people undergoing severe crises are blessed if they can gain access to a "poorly maintained, badly lit, cold, damp and outdated" mental hospital.
In these areas alone, the litany of this Government's failures is a full rosary. While the planning laws are being flouted, it is demonising planners and active citizens and promising to weaken an already puny set of controls.
The problem it now faces of deciding what to do about Judge Brian Curtin is hugely exacerbated by its failure to bring in a system for disciplining the judiciary - a failure for which Michael McDowell bears direct responsibility.
The virtual collapse of the penalty-points system has to be seen in the context of a Government that is putting vast amounts of money and effort into a computerised voting system to fix a problem that didn't exist but can't deliver a computerised system of law enforcement that is proven to save lives.
The crisis in the mental-health services is exacerbated by the acknowledged fact that there is no overall policy framework in place.
We have, though, an Irish way of dealing with crises. When something is falling apart, we put a few lines in the Constitution to say that it is pure, holy and altogether marvellous. When we wanted to make it clear that we didn't give a damn about crisis pregnancies, single parents and children brought up in poverty, we passed a constitutional amendment banning abortion. When we wanted to pretend that there was no problem with the Irish family, we voted to keep in the Constitution a prohibition on divorce.
And now, when the very idea of citizenship is mocked every day in every way, we'll have a referendum to show how affronted we are that this wonderful ideal is being besmirched by a few hundred nasty women coming here to have their babies.
The idea that this Government worries about the integrity of Irish citizenship is risible. A majority of its members served, either as ministers or junior ministers, in governments that hawked Irish passports around internationally with all the dignity and discrimination of a crack-addicted whore desperate for her next fix.
Michael McDowell told the Dáil last week that his own credentials were good because he eventually ended this naked prostitution of Irish citizenship. Fair enough - but the converse must also be true: those happy to see it continue for so long have no credibility on the issue whatsoever.
Since these people patently don't care about either the meaning or the forms of Irish citizenship, the urgency with which they have moved to place this issue at the head of a very long list of neglected priorities has to be explained. The rational explanation is not racism. It is far worse. Racism requires a certain degree of courage and conviction, qualities that don't immediately come to mind in relation to this Government. What we're seeing is a pandering to racism, a cynical, hollow pitch for the votes of a xenophobic minority.
This is a serious charge, and one I would much prefer not to have to make. There are genuine difficulties in the process of immigration - problems for already neglected communities and for health and education professionals in already overstretched services - and throwing charges of racism around doesn't help to create a genuine debate.
But when I'm getting leaflets through the door from my nice local Fianna Fáil candidate expressing fears about "the number of asylum-seekers and refugees entering this country" and promising to reject the supposed "open-door policy which is advocated by the parties of the left", I can only say about Irish citizenship what Gandhi said when asked about British civilisation - it would be a good idea.